Light in the Fogosphere

Some readers think that I created a false equivalence between the furor over Scott Beauchamp, The New Republic’s soldier-correspondent, and the furor over the O’Hanlon-Pollack Op-Ed.

Matthew Yglesias points out that the first raises a question of fact, the second a question of strategic judgment. He’s right about that. But my point wasn’t that the two cases in themselves are the same or even similar. What they have in common is the reaction they provoked in the opinion classes: an instantaneous effort to discredit or uphold.

These days, anything coming from Iraq—even an account of soldiers running over dogs—becomes a high-stakes skirmish in the propaganda war. Yes, the criticism of O’Hanlon and Pollack was based on their past judgments, not the factual claims in their Op-Ed. But that’s just the point. What if the two Brookings analysts had come back last month with tales of a potential catastrophe in the making, as Pollack did in 2005? Would the same critics have combed the archives for foolish statements and wrong assessments? It was the failure to pause for a minute and weigh the implications of their report before trashing it that revealed the toxic intellectual atmosphere clouding arguments over the war. Like the attacks on Beauchamp and The New Republic, that failure showed that objectivity is no longer an aspiration of people who make it their business to comment on the war every day.

One reader faults me, then half agrees:

I will grant you that there has been reluctance to accept the fact that for certain groups in Iraq, especially for the Sunni tribes in Al Anbar, we Americans have become the lesser enemy when compared with the hammer of Al Qaeda in Iraq and the anvil of Shia militias.…Part of the right’s fantasy is that all the soldiers are perfect knights who cannot think of a better place to spend their time for fifteen months than Iraq, smiting the enemies of the United States and proving our toughness by killing Arabs. Hence the attack on Beauchamp and vocal defense of the marines at Haditha. I think the right is more at fault in this than the left.

True. Behind the Weekly Standard’s attacks on Beauchamp’s credibility lies a Washington-based notion of military virtue that wouldn’t survive a few hours in Baghdad. As Phil Carter writes in a superb Slate essay that gives an Iraq veteran’s take on the case, “Anyone who finds Beauchamp’s story incredible merely because it’s upsetting has no idea what war can do.” But Carter ends by damning both their houses:

The Beauchamp dispatches show the extent to which the discourse over Iraq has been poisoned and how quickly the left, the right, and the military were willing to go to the mat to defend their version of what is—or what they thought ought to be—true. No one cares anymore about the troops, the truth of their reports from Iraq, or the serious issues of professional journalism associated with a series of this type. The troops have become pawns in this debate; their stories a kind of Rorschach test that reveals more about how we view the war than its reality on the ground.

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